As Intel's tick-tock CPU development Juggernaut rolls on, things seem very much on track, looking into the near future. Intel will launch its new "Ivy Bridge" 3rd Generation Core processor family in early-April 2012, which is a miniaturization of what is essentially the "Sandy Bridge" to the new 22 nm process, with IPC and instruction-set improvements, along with a faster graphics controller. The new process will also up clock speeds and overclocking headroom for chips that support it. What's more interesting, though, is that the architecture that succeeds Ivy Bridge, codenamed "Haswell", will be less than an year away in April...well almost.

A roadmap slide sourced by DonanimHaber pins the launch of Haswell to March-June, 2013. Haswell is a brand new CPU architecture that will succeed Ivy Bridge. According to the conventional idea of Intel's tick-tock CPU development strategy, it will be built on the 22 nm fab process, which will have gained some maturity by then. Intel follows a "tick-tock" product development model. Every year, Intel's product lineup sees either of the two. A "tock" brings in a new x86 architecture, a "tick" miniaturizes it to a newer silicon fabrication process. Earlier reports indicated that Haswell Core processors will be based on a newer socket, the LGA1150, and hence it will not be compatible with LGA1155 platforms.

Except that people like me would upgrade the CPU if possible w/o replacing the other components. Not being able to do that forces me to run the entire combination longer and miss upgrade cycles (due at least in part to Windows upgrade headaches when core hardware changes). Of course I am not a good example, I am still dual booting Win7/XP and I use XP at least 75% of the time.

I expect there are a lot of people like me who would buy more processors if they could be dropped in to the current socket - with a BIOS upgrade of course.

The 775 socket got to live as long as it did because Netburst sucked the south end of a north bound donkey.

1156, 1366, 1155, and 2011 aren't in the same position that 775 was. The subsequent architectures are all facing competition, so they aren't resting upon unproven and defective ideas. The fact that 1155 and 2011 are going to get a second generation is nice, but not something common with Intel. I would feel far angrier if I was one of the people who bought 1156 and 1366, given that they only had one generation of life.

All of this said, only slightly more than two years of a socket is pretty crappy. AMD might not have the highest of high end chips, but their socket replacement style is pretty good. This is, of course, overlooking the FM sockets....